Salesa excited at bringing the stories of Samoa to life

By MARGIE THOMSON

It's nice to think about all the books in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Not just the dry, fingered ones that already line the shelves along with all the boxes of old papers and photographs, but the ones waiting to be written.

These are books whose substance is already there, their stories lying piecemeal and uninterpreted in catalogue boxes, in piles of old letters, diaries and maps, in coils of microfilm, but whose form has not yet been construed by their authors. These Aladdin-like wordsmiths venture into the stacks and conjure up the genies of the past, breathing life into history.

Such is Damon Salesa, a young historian just back from three years at Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. The National Library's research fellow for 2001, he has already begun researching at the Alexander Turnbull Library for a people's history of Samoa in the 19th century.

Salesa's own history contains elements of a classic, 20th-century Samoan story. His father, from a high-achieving sporting family, emigrated to New Zealand and has worked in the same East Tamaki factory ever since. The junior Salesa worked at the same factory every summer to support himself through first a bachelor's and then a master's degree in history at the University of Auckland, eventually becoming the first Pacific Island Rhodes scholar.

Salesa's mother, a Palagi, is a nurse at Middlemore Hospital, and the family has always lived in Glen Innes, where Salesa went to primary and intermediate schools before attending Selwyn college.

While outsiders often consider Glen Innes to be tough and run down, Salesa loves it for its supportive network, its pool of talented people who often want only for an opportunity. He considers himself fortunate to have grown up there.

Salesa's latest achievement, securing the $45,000 fellowship from the National Library, is another first: never before has it been awarded for Pacific studies.

While his methodology is undoubtedly scholarly, Salesa's goal is to produce a history that "people can connect with ... I want to write about the adventures of ordinary life."

Histories of Samoa have generally focused on "a small set of concerns" - on the chiefs and their field of high politics, on the missionaries and religious change, and on international involvement in the archipelago, he says.

"I want to concentrate on the histories of children, women, non-chiefly men, the social effects of warfare, and economic adaptation."

The 19th century was a time of enormous change for Samoans. As an example: the Samoan language was not written until the 1830s, and yet within a generation 90 per cent of the population was literate. While the word and the Word were probably the Palagi's greatest weapons, the colonists also brought steel, cattle, goats, dynamite, tinned food - all small in themselves but each one representing revolutionary change.

When dynamite first came to Samoa in the 1870s, for instance, it wasn't used in warfare (although it was a time of widespread fighting) but for fishing. But along with the many fish it could blow out of the water were many hands and arms of the people using this new and brutal means of sea-harvesting.

Cricket was another popular import, and it became customary in Apia for teams to march down the main road, stopping to salute the British consulate and flag before beginning a major game.

Striking a balance between the humour, pain and irony inherent in so many stories is one of Salesa's greatest challenges, and one he will think carefully about when he gets to the end of his research, hopefully at the end of this year, and begins writing.

In the meantime he is scouring the library's several hundred relevant collections of Samoan material. The Turnbull's collection is growing all the time - it recently bought a collection of photograph albums from the 1880s, for instance - and some of it has not been looked at before.

"That part really is a voyage of discovery, and where the excitement lies," Salesa says.

"I love it. It can get a bit dull every now and then but something will always just hit you, it reaches out. People ask how I can sit there for eight hours a day and read, but it's easy when you think it's a way of reaching across time."

In the rustling of "these crusty old papers," we may hear the sound of life being conjured from history. Salesa, a very modest research fellow, simply says: "If people can read it and enjoy it I'll be happy."